Printer manufacturers oftentimes employ business models in which they receive revenue from customers based upon the customers' use of the printers. In these types of business models, the printer manufacturers charge customers fees that are derived from accountable print parameters like amount of ink or toner the customers use, the number of sheets printed by the customers, or the print quality. To track the printer usage, the print jobs rendered by a printer driver are registered in an accounting database maintained by the printer manufacturer. In addition, the accountable print parameter is matched with the print jobs registered in the accounting database.
However, in various situations, users have been able to use the printer driver of a first printer to print on a second printer, for instance, if a print job rendered by the printer driver of the first printer is printable on the second printer. This may occur, for example, if both printers support the same page description language. In this case, the amount of ink or toner used, or the number of sheets printed, by a particular printer will not match the usage data stored in the accounting database and a user will be able to print documents without being charged for those documents. As such, users have been able to circumvent use of the proper printer driver for a particular printer, resulting in lost revenue for printer manufacturers.
Conventional solutions to these types of problems require that the print jobs be manually verified with various printer statistics, such as, number of pages printed and print quality. This type of manual verification, however, is labor-intensive and adds significant costs to implementing the usage-based printing business model discussed above.